Game Control (31 page)

  Cacophony preceded the next chamber: screeing, chittering and scrambling, over the whir of exercise wheels. The three filed past cages of chimps, pigeons, hamsters and, naturally, rats. She looked for signs of abuse, but aside from a few mice looking peaked, most of the animals appeared healthy, leaping and poking through the mesh as she walked by. Only the last cage gave Calvin noticeable pause: one of the green monkeys was dead. It looked like Malthus.

In Norman's office, Ensor's 'Masque of the Red Death' grinned over his potted plants. Norman closed the door and locked it. He fixed them coffee and biscuits; while, prepared for salmon and champagne, Eleanor had lost her appetite.

  'Progress report?' Calvin required, reclining in an armchair.

  'These mice have sped up a number of experiments.' Norman propped his sandals on his desk. 'Fitting the juvenile bill is a cinch; any number of organisms look promising, since a kid's immune system isn't fully in gear until at least five. It's this discrete shaving of the labour force that's the tall order. We're looking for weaknesses in gene pools that are represented in the proportion of the adult population you

want to crop. But chromosomes aren't constant across populations, and that information is hard to come by. We got your Western geriatric requisition, and even that's not as simple as you'd think. Run the gauntlet of seventy years, you're a survivor.

  'For the reproductive ages,' he went on, though it was hard to take anyone seriously who discussed the future of humanity with a mouth covered in biscuit crumbs, 'it's a bitch to beat what's on the market already. I've come to have a hell of a respect for HIV—30 to

60 per cent vertical transmission; and the sexual connection is poetic. In Africa it's spreading like Christmas. Asia may follow suit. How could you ask for more?'

  'Takes too long,' said Calvin. 'And all these bloodhounds snuffling for a cure, they're bound to dig up something eventually. There's money in it.'

  'Sure. But you know what's going to happen? They'll come up with a therapy, all right. It will cost a bundle. We'll save a handful of well-heeled gays in America. But governments spend an average of two dollars a year on health care here! What are the chances anyone's going to front 6,000 dollars apiece for an updated AZT? Africa will still be a write-off, so will the subcontinent. And the Chinese government will be dancing in the streets to have that disease. I bet they're already inviting Haitian gays, Manhattan mainliners and Nairobi prostitutes as guests of the nation.'

  'Pachyderm will outclass HIV. AIDS is a pretty tortuous way to go.'

  'That's the other thing,' Norman said. 'This stipulation that Pachyderm's to be like Bactine. We can come up with something quick. But every potion stings, Pipe. Dying isn't usually a lot of fun.'

  'Pachyderm doesn't have to be pain-free so long as it's fast. There's only so much punishment people can experience overnight.'

  'Pi-prrr,' Norman purred. 'You haven't suffered much, have you? It is astonishing the agony a man can pack into ten seconds. Multiply overnight by two billion and you have an impressive aggregate of hell.'

  'We have an impressive aggregate of hell already. Do what you can. As for HIV, I've put Eleanor on to it. If HIV's up to the job, splendid, we close shop.'

  'Eleanor, we'll have to be in touch, then.' He sprinkled in his hand from the snuff box around his neck and proceeded to roll a joint. 'AIDS demography is crucial. Because this country is
hot
. My squash game is off-form. The disco's OK, but we never have live jazz. I don't want to sweat it out in this second-rate Club Med if I don't have to. Which reminds me, my man, we badly need some new films.
The
Killing Fields
has shown three times. All things being equal, I would really prefer
The Blues Brothers
.'

  'How about,' Calvin suggested, '
The Elephant Man
?'

  Norman took a few deep drags and passed the joint to Eleanor. She accepted; Calvin looked over, eyebrows raised. In adolescence she'd avoided dope, for it made her more awkward and tongue-tied than she was already. Right now, however, getting stoned seemed just the ticket. She had a hunch that Norman smoked this stuff all the time.

  'No use offering any to Mr Straight here,' said Norman, taking the reefer back. 'He disapproves of drugs that don't kill you. Which reminds me, just in case you think we're flat on our bums here, Pipe, you should know we've come up with half a dozen concentrated virtually instantaneous toxins that will dissolve in water or disperse through the air.'

  'So what's the problem?'

  'They nix everybody.'

  Calvin smiled. 'Has an appeal, doesn't it?'

  'And how. If we really cared about this planet, we'd all cheer one last sunset with bright pink Guyana Kool-Aid, in tiny biodegradable paper cups.

  'You know,' he went on, exhaling, 'QUIETUS has to make up its mind about a test run.'

  'We're uncomfortable, Norman.'

  'Even if we make a hash of it and our fatality rates go too high, you're talking a few hundred max.'

  'The problem is detection. If we wipe out a third of a village and it becomes an international incident, we run the risk of being traced. No one in QUIETUS is keen to get done for tossing a mere ditchful of unfortunates.'

  'Why assume you'd get fingered? Target a village in an AIDS pocket. A bit of a confound, but whole towns are already dropping off the map in Tanzania and nobody gives a toss…Can you imagine,' he supposed, studying the curling smoke, 'the havoc, the hysteria, if towns were dissolving one after another in North Carolina, in Yorkshire? But in East Africa, who would notice one more? Renamo shot up 1,000 Mozambicans last week and the news report was one column long.'

  'Things go wrong,' warned Calvin.

  'Hell yes, that's why we need a test. Throwing Pachyderm to the winds without a small-scale trial would be like catering a banquet and serving your new recipe for mango chowder without cooking a bowl of it first. You're talking about inflicting a brand-new microbe on the entire human race. The stakes are pretty high if we're a bit off. Especially if we decide on a virus; the bastards mutate on you in no time.'

  'The biggest danger is we fail. You keep worrying about fatality going too high; I'm more concerned it won't go high enough.'

  'You're not cooking in my kitchen—it's lucky we wash our hands. With the boil and bubble in this lab, it's a miracle the whole operation hasn't melted like the Wicked Witch of the West into the plains of the NFD. Don't you worry about fatality. This lab is a snake farm. I'm not opening the cages until I know what the animal's going to do.'

  Calvin grunted. 'I suppose there's time to sort this out. You're not likely to resolve Pachyderm any time in the immediate future.'

  Norman leered. 'I beg to differ.'

  Calvin's forehead rippled into an expression Norman might read as hopeful, but Eleanor saw as
nervous.

  'We expect to have your elephant on a platter quite shortly,' Norman assured him, relighting his joint.

  'How shortly?'

  '
Shortly
,' Norman repeated, in the same voice Calvin had reiterated
drastic
to BC. 'And if we get ahead of schedule, why wait for 1999? Sure you're not that superstitious about Nostradamus. The sooner we strike, the fewer futureless five-year-olds we have to put to sleep.'

  'True,' said Calvin, without enthusiasm.

  'So you'll have to address dissemination more seriously. If we go for air delivery, you'll need to mobilize a fair force of planes, and there's the obstacle of airspace. Just anyone doesn't fly over China. Start collecting data on weather patterns. Seeding could be arranged so if an ill-wind were on its way, you wouldn't have to crop dust directly over countries where getting permission to fly private craft could be dodgy.'

  Norman led the visiting director and his research assistant on a tour of the facility, pointing out promising strategies, introducing their authors, updating his employer on the status of each experiment. Eleanor, packed in the protective cotton of powerful Kenyan
bhang
, was beginning to find it all very intriguing. Calvin, rather than shoulder-clap his way through his staff with that fatherly swagger to Norman's office, had curled into himself. He mumbled to technicians, and even with the most advanced projects seemed distracted, uninvolved—or especially with these.

  'Just how hard,' Eleanor inquired of Norman as the two walked ahead of Calvin, 'did you work on inducing infertility instead of fatality?'

  'Pretty hard.' Norman shrugged. 'Same problem as with our contagions: we could only design drugs that were 100 per cent effective. Throw total infertility at a population and it dies out. So we gave up.'

  'But you haven't given up on a pathogen, even when your first solutions failed.'

  Norman squinted. 'What are you implying?'

  'I simply wonder,' said Eleanor carefully, her words far away and difficult to pronounce, 'whether you gave a non-mortality route your all. Knowing Calvin, I mean. I might find even inducing involuntary infertility extreme, but Calvin wouldn't. It wouldn't appeal to him.'

  'And death does?'

  Eleanor stopped staring at the floor and looked Norman in the eye. 'You know it does.' She kept her voice down. 'Poison is more attractive than progesterone. To Calvin? It's sexier.' Her brittle laugh was meant only for herself.

  'I thought you were into this,' said Norman suspiciously. 'Inner circle. Gung-ho. Or Piper wouldn't bring you here.'

  'I found out about QUIETUS by accident,' Eleanor admitted. 'Calvin hadn't any choice but to involve me. But how I feel about it—I don't know.'

  Norman clammed up.

  'Doesn't it bother you,' she asked softly as they strolled the hall, 'what you do here? Aren't you a little disturbed, or frightened, or disgusted?'

  'Not really. It's a great game.'

  'Is it a game?'

  'Ask your boyfriend.'

  Eleanor's fingertips grazed the wall, checking it was solid. If Pachyderm was a game, it seemed to have got rather out of hand.

  'Pipe.' Norman noted at their plane. 'One last thing. I'm afraid we haven't got anywhere on Semitic immunity.'

  Calvin looked crestfallen. 'Maybe we can skip Israel, then. Fly over Egypt instead.'

  'You soft-headed chump,' said Norman affectionately. 'Israel is smaller than Connecticut. With an airborne toxin, drift alone—'

  'I'll warn them ahead, then,' Calvin grumbled, 'to paint ZPG in lamb's blood over their doorways.'

  Norman shook his head. 'Remember, the flagellants claimed the plague was all the Jews' fault. Leave them out, they'll get blamed for it.'

  'What was that about?' asked Eleanor on the plane.

  'I don't want to cull the Jews,' said Calvin. 'They've done their part.'

  Eleanor stared. He was, for once, serious. Holocaust II was a pogrom on everyone
but
the Jews—Calvin's gonzo idea of justice. Then, they were sufficiently ensconced in the realm of the ridiculous by now that to find any aspect of Calvin's agenda more cuckoo than another was more or less arbitrary.

  When they'd returned to his cottage, Calvin was still somewhere in Andromeda, though from the comet tails creasing his forehead and the meteor craters in the muscles around his mouth, she sensed there was trouble in outer space. Rather than suffer invasions from Mars, Calvin's planet was occasionally attacked by Earthlings, which must have been traumatic on a land otherwise populated exclusively by rats, cock-roaches, maggots and cancers.

Solastina lit a fire. Calvin went through the mail. Eleanor fed Malthus, a ritual Calvin observed over the top of his glasses with irritation.

  For as Eleanor and the miscreant had shared the same space—and the same master—the animal gradually let down his guard. Early on the monkey didn't glare as blackly as he used to, but shot Eleanor furtive glances. Little by little he executed these circumspections from a slightly more proximate position. The first time Malthus extended his arm to her thigh, Calvin had leapt to her rescue in alarm. But instead of clawing into her leg Malthus clutched a fold of her clothing, looking in the other direction with an expression of bored innocence.

  Lately, however, Calvin's arch fiend had taken to resting his head against her knee, until not long ago Eleanor had turned to the animal with calm curiosity as he played with a copper-seven from her briefcase and touched the top of his head. Malthus acted coolly and bent the IUD with only more rapt fascination. Shortly thereafter she had volunteered to feed him and Calvin jeered, good luck, but Malthus accepted the corn as blithely from her hands as from Calvin's, which left his owner stupefied, if not put out. You would never describe the relationship between Eleanor and Malthus as warm, but certainly it was tolerant, and Malthus no more than tolerated Calvin himself. Now Eleanor fed the monkey so often that Calvin, betrayed, told her to take over the job. Ever since Malthus had agreed to ride on Eleanor's back, Calvin had refused to take the turncoat anywhere, as punishment. Indeed, Malthus and his master were no longer on speaking terms.

  The whole household now colluded against him. Panga mocked him as a mountebank, and would loll in corners with Eleanor exchanging paramilitary girl's-talk. Solastina had joined their crowd as well, taking his orders from Eleanor, because she was always so beastly decent to him. She made puns in Swahili Calvin didn't get while loitering with the servant in the kitchen. Why, sometimes the daft woman would chop vegetables.

  But it was Malthus who had most broken faith, violated Calvin's unshakeable confidence that the monkey was impervious to tenderness.

  'I've thought we should stop feeding him altogether,' Calvin growled over his new
Lancet
, after observing the one-time holy terror literally eating out of her hand for as long as he could stand. 'I don't believe in food aid. Creates dependency. Turns its victims soft.'